e a bad precedent, and one in
favor of class separation and class distinction. His speech embodies a
masterly historical sketch of the town form of government.

CHAPTER XXVI.

A SAVIOUR OF HUMAN LIFE.

While Carleton enjoyed that kind of work, ethical, literary,
benevolent, and political, which appealed to sentiment and aroused
sympathy to the burning point, he was an equally faithful coworker
with God and man in enterprises wholly unsentimental. He who waits
through eternity for his creatures to understand his own creation,
knows how faithfully good men can cooeperate with him in plans which
only unborn and succeeding generations can appreciate.

Out of a thousand illustrations we may note, along the lines of
electric science, the names of Professor Kinnersly, who probably first
led Franklin into that line of research which enabled him to "snatch
the sceptre from tyrants and the lightning from heaven," and Professor
Moses Gerrish Farmer, who broke new paths into the once unknown. As
early as 1859, Mr. Farmer lighted his whole house with electric
lights, and blew up a little ship by a tiny submarine torpedo in 1847,
and in the same year propelled by electricity a car carrying
passengers. Yet neither of these names is found in the majority of
ordinary cyclopedias or books of reference.

Familiar with such facts, both by a general observation of life, and
by a special and critical study of the literature of patents and
inventions, Carleton felt perfectly willing to devote himself to a
work that he knew would yield but little popular applause, even when
victory should be won,--the abolition of railway level or "grade"
crossings.

During a brief morning call on Carleton, shortly after he had been
elected Senator in the Massachusetts Legislature for the session of
1890, I asked him what he proposed especially to do. "Well," said he,
"I think that if I can get all grade crossings abolished from the
railroads of the whole Commonwealth, it will be a good winter's work."

Forthwith he set himself to study the problem, to master resources and
statistics, to learn the relation between capital invested and profits
made by the railway corporation, and especially to measure the forces
in favor of and in opposition to the proposed reform.

About this time, the chief servant of Shawmut Church was studying an
allied question. While the "grade crossing" slew its thousands of
non-travelling citizens, the freight-car, wit